Major data trends occurring in the enterprise are focused on cloud and artificial intelligence platforms. But while companies are often eager to learn more about this tech, they aren’t quite sure how they will benefit, according to Ariel Kelman, vice president of worldwide marketing at Amazon Web Services Inc.

“Machine-learning and AI are really at the forefront of a lot of discussions in enterprise IT, and there’s massive interest, but it’s still early,” said Kelman (pictured). “One of the things we’re seeing companies really focused on now is just getting all their data ready to do the machine-learning training and training all their people to be able to use new skills.”

Kelman spoke with John Furrier and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Informatica World event in Las Vegas. They discussed some of the major trends occurring in both cloud and AI environments, new developments for AWS and what the company is offering its customers in terms of education (see the full interview with transcript here). The interview was condensed for clarity. (* Disclosure below.)

Knight: What are you seeing as the major cloud and AI trends and what are your customers telling you?

Kelman: We’re seeing tons of interest. It’s still very early, but … getting all the data imported and ready, it’s almost doubled or tripled in importance as it was when people were just trying to do analytics. Now, they’re doing machine-learning as well. We’re seeing huge interest in that.

Furrier: What’s your relationship with Informatica? 

Kelman: We’ve been working together for a long time, and it’s very complementary. I think the relationship really started deepening when we released Redshift in 2013. And having so many customers that wanted to get data into the cloud to do data we’re housing, we’re already using Informatica to help get the data loaded and cleansed. And so really they’re one of the great partners that’s fueling moving data into the cloud and helping our customers be more successful with Redshift.

Knight: What are some best practices that have emerged in working with companies that require a lot of pre-work, because they need to be very thoughtful about getting their data sorted?

Kelman: I think the number one thing I recommend is to first take a step back from the data and to focus on what your business requirements are. Companies sometimes will have a data science-driven project. OK, here’s all the data we have. Let’s put it in one place. However, they may not be spending time proportionate to the value of the data. That’s one of the key things we see. Just trying to come up with a strong plan around what answers you’re trying to get. What questions you need answers to.

Furrier: You guys are creating a lot of awareness. I see a lot of billboards everywhere, a lot of TV ads. Is that part of the strategy to get you guys more brand awareness?

Kelman: That’s all part of our strategy. What we’re trying to do is communicate to the world how our customers are being successful using our technology, specifically machine-learning and AI. It’s one of those things where so many companies want to do it, but they say, “Well, what am I supposed to use it for?”

If you dumb down what marketing is at AWS, it’s inspiring people about what they can run in the cloud with AWS. What use cases they should consider us for, and then we spend a lot of energy giving them the technical education they need, so they can be successful using our products. At the end of the day, we make money when our customers are successful using our products.

Knight: One of the themes that’s really emerging in this conversation is the need to make sure developers are ready and that your people are skilled and know what they need to know. How is AWS thinking about the skills gap?

Kelman: We’ll say, “What are all the ways we can attack the problem?” and then we’ll try and help. So, we have free training that we’ve been creating online. We’ve been partnering with large online training firms like Udacity and Coursera. We have an ML solutions lab that helps companies’ prototypes. We have a significant professional services team, and then we’re working with all our systems integrators partners to build up their machine-learning practices. It’s a new area for a lot of them, and we’ve been pushing them to add more people so they can help their customers.

Furrier: What pieces of curriculum should people be learning to be successful if machine-learning continues to grow?

Kelman: There aren’t enough good developers. We’re in a world where any enterprise that is going to be successful is going to have their own software developers. They’re going to be writing their own software. That’s not how the world was 15 years ago, but if you’re a large corporation and you’re outsourcing your technology, you’re going to get disrupted by someone else who believes in custom software and developers.

The demand for good software engineers … we deal with it all the time. It is always going to outstrip supply. So, for young people, I would encourage them to start coding and to not be over reliant on the university curriculums, which don’t always keep pace with the latest trends.

Furrier: What’s new in your world at AWS?

Kelman: We’re in the early planning stages of our re:Invent conference. Our engineers are hard at work on a lot of new technology that we’re going to have ready between now and our re:Invent show. My team’s been doing a lot of work with sports organizations. We’ve had some interesting machine-learning work with Major League Baseball. They rolled out a new machine-learning model to do stolen base predictions this year.

You can see on some of the broadcasts, as a runner goes past first base, we’ll have a ticker that will show what the probability is that they’ll be successful stealing second base if they choose to run. Trying to make all those scenes a little more entertaining and … trying to use AI machine-learning to give a little more insight into what’s been going on.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Informatica World 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World 2019. Neither Informatica LLC, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE